For at least a dozen years now I’ve been admonishing myself to Simplify! and Slow down! Yet life keeps getting more and more complicated while moving past at a dizzying blur. I sleep maybe five hours a night but still haven’t been able to find the time to squeeze in a week in Aruba or that tour of the Mediterranean I long for.
Problem is, I still have the hunger, you know? Twelve books published/accepted for publication and I still can’t wait to get started on the next one, the next screenplay, the next big project. Writing is like sushi to me. I can sit at the bar and stuff myself till I’m cross-eyed, then wake up famished next morning.
Been making some progress, though. The ARCs arrived for Hangtime, A Confession. There’s a very striking photo of a daiquiri on the cover. Makes me want a daiquiri with my next order of sushi.
And I’ve received word that my slipstream novella Flying Fish will be published next summer as a limited edition hardcover by PS Publishing in the UK. Novellas are excruciatingly hard to sell these days, so I’m delirious with delight to be with a classy independent like PS Publishing.
And only two scenes to go to finish the first full draft of my literary mystery Jigsaw/D. The funeral scene and a kind of coda–as if a funeral isn’t coda enough. Come to think of it, a funeral is coda only for the occupant of the casket. The rest of us then have to adjourn to a church basement to eat lasagna and three-bean salad. I’d rather be in the casket.
An interviewer once asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” I said, “How do you stop the ideas?” It’s like Chinese water torture trying to keep the drip drip drip of ideas from drilling a hole through my skull. No wonder I can sleep only five hours a night.
I wonder what it’s like to relax. I mean really relax. Lean back, put the feet up, become a happy little turnip. Anybody know how?
A while back when I was writing for the Discovery Channel I interviewed a robotocist named Hans Moravec who was working on a way to download the contents of the human brain onto a computer disk. He envisioned a time when we will make thousands of copies of ourselves and send them out into the universe to gather the knowledge and wisdom of the cosmos. That day can’t come soon enough for me. I’m going to dedicate my copies to solving the mysteries of relaxation.
